At the beginning of the story, Connie is presented as a superficial adolescent girl who only cares about her looks and the attention it garners from boys her age. Yet she undergoes a dramatic character transformation through her conflict with Arnold Friend, who threatens to harm her family if she does not follow him to his car:

“You come out here nice like a lady and give me your hand, and nobody else gets hurt, I mean, your nice old bald-headed daddy and your mummy and your sister in her high heels. Because listen: why bring them in this?"

Connie almost immediately realizes that she will sacrifice herself to save her family, who will never know that she has done so. This realization reduces her to screams which ring throughout her house, and she sobs until she is soaking wet. This is the moment of Connie’s character transformation, and there is a sort of death in the acceptance; she feels that “Arnold Friend [is] stabbing her again and again with no tenderness.” When she fully accepts her fate, she rises to meet Arnold Friend and her fate. Perhaps the greatest testament to the full transformation of her character is that Arnold Friend tells her that she is “better than them because not a one of them would have done this for [her].” Connie’s self-sacrifice does not depend on anything she will receive in return. Instead, she accepts pain and suffering for a family who has not shown her great love and who perhaps would not have spared her had they been given the same choice.